Now, we can take a look at where we are with respect to profitability after the increase in advertising spend. The good news is that we are finally beginning to see some positive revenue coming from Amazon to our bank account after cost of goods, Amazon fees, and Amazon advertising charges, so the money machine in principle works. Next, we need to tune and scale it to cover our salary costs and profit. Let’s take a deeper dive.

But something was wrong. Why didn’t the Amazon US sponsored products automatic campaign result in similar results despite identical product descriptions and images? We even managed to ramp up the US reviews faster than the UK reviews with nearly 20 by mid-November. Then we started digging at the ad reports that Amazon makes available…

I’ve been using gamification in teaching history for ages. Or at least as long as I’ve been teaching history. So, today I am going tell you how I have gamified my history lessons. Below is a list of gamification elements and an example how I have used it on my history lessons.

Last night I started to write today’s blog post about how you can boost your creative juice and I got stuck, basically after 5 minutes. Yes, the fear of the blank page was right there. I wanted to start this blog by writing about the importance of creativity in the 21st century. I mostly ended up with the arguments commonly used by various people, authorities and startups: Creativity is mostly seen as important 21st century skill in order to be more competitive in the future job market, as key to economic growth and most recently, as key differentiator to artificial intelligence and robotics.

Looking at how the education exports have started, it is clear that exporting of Finnish education methods is not as straight-forward in practice as has been expected by many authorities. We have discovered a couple of ways around the local culture and money flow imposed constraints to enable experimenting with new types of learning experiences.

Our role as elementary side of this PBL project is to have our own Phenomenon Fair. Main topic of the fair is Finland as a 100-year-old nation. Fourth graders’ very own subtopic to the main topic is the Baltic Sea. Within that context, the students are now working on their own fair stands, acts or presentations. Within the Baltic Sea context, the topics are ranging from battles of the Baltic Sea to seaweed and everything in between.

With the blog post series “Creativity Tuesday” we would like to help readers pump up their creative confidence playfully with easy exercises, but also talk about the topic we are most passionate about: Creativity.

We are currently at approximately €100 thousand run rate and expect to reach €400 thousand run rate by the end of the year. To put these numbers into perspective, Peter Thiel bought 10% of Facebook for $500 thousand in 2004 at a time, when Facebook’s run rate annual revenue was $150 thousand and the number of employees was seven. LUPO is no Facebook, but let’s take a look at some things that LUPO is instead.

Gameweek is behind us and all went well. Some of the gameweek’s activities are being reviewed and linked to our classrooms by me and my colleagues. Definitely some very useful to stuff to use outside the gameweek also.

All of this means, that we must find ways to raise money to enable bootstrapping our ecosystem. Once we have enough money for advertising, we can get more online reviews and the conversion of online advertising to sales will improve. Once we have the local teacher training programs in place with local partners, we can ramp up school sales in target markets. Once we have built our community platform, we can engage our customers and partners to create new value that can be monetized within the ecosystem, expanding the ecosystem. The virtuous circle needs a nudge.

Yesterday we had the first activities of our gameweek. Students were really motivated, engaged and active during the whole day. Not even a fire drill changed their mood. Everything worked out well but I think we need more time to finish these cool things that we have started. The activities will continue during this week and maybe some parts of next week as well.

This week I had a chance to talk with Pasi Joronen from Polkuni about the importance of music, happiness and self-expression in today’s society. Pasi has had multiple roles in media and is currently helping startups as business coach, mentor and investor.

Writing this on day two of four in the train from Essen to Dusseldorf, where we have our Airbnb. What a show. I never imagined that a boardgame show could be as big as Spiel’17. Someone said that today alone there were 120 000 visitors in the event. We sure saw our share of the action although our stand is in hall 6 among the more indie games, role playing games, and e.g. the Board Games Geek stand.

Hello guys! Do you remember when I wrote about taking part in the international gameweek. We have been busy with the students brainstorming and thinking what could we do during the gameweek. First the whole concept got out of hand and I had to set some boundaries to the activities the students were thinking. After that, the ideas were more concrete with clear structures, instructions and thought.

Today we will enter a World of Insights with Timo Karjalainen, Creative Lead. Timo and his wife Eliza Hochman, CEO, co-founded World of Insights in order to understand how learning happens in organisations and how to break old fashioned structures of learning in order to promote co-creation, open dialogue, playfulness and creativity.

By now we are pretty much set for Essen. My other running concern is driving up reviews on Amazon UK and Amazon US, so that the product’s discoverability would improve ahead if the all-important holiday sales season. If you are willing to write a review, please contact me.

In today’s episode Gerhard visited the wonderful people at Kokoa Agency to have a chat with Olli Vallo. Olli was originally a class teacher, but then found his passion for EdTech during his PhD studies, when he worked with a company that developed a music platform for schools.

Writing this on my way back from an amazing week at India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT) sponsored EDTECH CAMPUS event for exploring collaboration options between Finnish and Indian companies, non-profits and academia to innovate improvements to India’s education system.

Thinking of the Indian context, LUPO EDU could be viewed as a shortcut for improving the quality of teaching of India’s millions of existing teachers. The LUPO cards are low-cost and low-tech, not requiring huge investments nor computing resources in the classroom. The online resources are highly scalable at a low cost, enabling continued training of existing teachers as well as teacher students. We currently offer face-to-face trainings, which we would like to explore scaling with Indian teacher training companies as well as by developing online versions of these courses.

This week, we reached our goal 10 positive reviews for “LUPO: The Space Adventure” in Amazon UK and started experimenting with driving traffic to the listing page. We also received the “Co-Created with City of Espoo Schools” certificate for the project we ran with several schools and the technology training company Mehackit last spring. Apart from these milestones, it was another learning experience week for us.

So last week I talked about my classroom’s experience point system. I forgot to mention that the purchases are co-created with the students and their parents. Students are now for some odd reason saving up the points even though they all are well past level to which is 2000 XP points. Weird.

This week, we’ll address three topics: the board gamer event learnings from last weekend, expansion of our distribution channels, and current thoughts on crowdfunding as an option for tapping into new audiences in building awareness for LUPO.

Students collect points from positive feedback, homework, teamwork, projects and different kinds of assignments. For example from every positive feedback from teachers that teach my students they get 100 xp points. They level up when they reach 1000 xp points. They can use the points to buy different things. For example 1000 xp points can buy you a new place to sit in the classroom or a recess indoors. If students buy stuff they will lose a certain amount of points which is the cost of the purchase.

In today’s episode Gary had the honor to talk to Lauri Jarvilehto, CEO of Lightneer. Lauri is extremely passionate about learning and how to help kids, young adults or basically anyone to spark their love for learning. In his opinion games are a wonderful tool to do exactly this and give young kids the context that is so often missing in today’s classroom.

We feel that we have a pretty unique product, with lots of value for multiple audiences. But what we feel doesn’t matter for ramping up sales from zero to sustainability. These multiple audiences need to discover our product. And they need to see the value in it for themselves. Building awareness and simply reaching audiences to be able to communicate the value propositions is the first hurdle every startup faces after product launch.

So last time I was about to start playing LUPO: The Space Adventure with my class of 4th graders. Yesterday we finished the game and students were really into it. Everyone working together and coming up with amazingly ridiculous solutions.

LUPO World has joined Polkuni, a Helsinki and Hong Kong based hands-on investment and activation company. With Polkuni we have strong partner on our side, who will help us to reach new markets in Germany, USA and Hong Kong.

It’s better to have 100 people [who] love you than finding a million who just sort of like you. This is the stage we are in right now. Still burning money, but we now have a product to sell, a live web site, and the first 100 paying customers. Next, we want to create 100 happy customers by learning about who they are, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what would they like more of in terms of add-on decks, complementary materials or services, etc.

I am an elementary school teacher and I work with kids aged 8-12. The class I teach is fifth grade and the students are aged 11-12. They have some experience in the use of games in the classroom, but not that much

Welcome to the first episode of our “LUPO & Friends” podcast! With LUPO & Friends we try to invite amazing people to talk about creativity, education, technology, games and unserious and very ridiculous things.

HELP! A very tiny, very serious and very normal evil has swept through LUPO World: Baron Cashew. Tomi and Antti, who managed to escape from the boring fist of Baron Cashew, need YOUR help during Worldcon75 to build an army of ridiculous creatures to fight Baron Cashew and his wig-robot army.

We have now opened our online store, hosted by Holvi, so you can now start making purchases of LUPO products. We included also free downloadable samples of subsets of the product, which are playable and let you get a feeling of the gameplay experience.

Finnish EdTech innovation LUPO World was evaluated from the points of view of pedagogical approach and
learning engagement by Kokoa Agency for the quick trials project of Espoo city schools, where LUPO World..

The ridiculous, crazy and fun card game LUPO: The Space Adventure has been hacked at the LINKO + Heureka Hackathon. The LINKO + Heureka Hackathon invited everyone with an interest in and passion for education, to solve wicked problems within 48 hours. LUPO World challenged participants to hack…

Finnish creative and ridiculous EdTech startup, LUPO World™, has been selected from among over 110 applicants for the xEdu Spring 2017 program! LUPO World envisages empowering teachers as heroes of their classroom with hands-on, easy to use and creative tools to transform their classroom into a playground of 21st century learning and teaching.